Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the page. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

29 April 2011

Ismail was raised in Kedah province (map), in northwest Malaysia. He earned a living sewing clothes and dancing in female roles in local dance troupes.

In his twenties he became more and more aware that the dancing and his female clothing were contrary to Islam, but he could not give them up. One night during Ramadan he had a vision of heaven. He vowed to change, but not before a dance performance a few days later. Then he fell into a trance for three days.

On emerging he gave up dress-making, female clothing and dancing. He conducted a special purification for his house in that the materials had been purchased from a Chinese kafir.

He then dressed in the white robes of an alim and began preaching to his neighbours about hellfire. As the others knew him from before, his radical transformation was taken as divine intervention. The religious bureaucrats feared that he would be taken as a prophet. They interviewed him, declared him to be impious, and his preachings to be tempting but false. However he went on to a more prestigious role as a healer.

At the Portman Clinic he is involved in individual and group therapy for trans people who want a

solution other than surgery, and for post-operatives who regret their surgery, and need help to avoid suicide. This is the only service of its kind in the UK's NHS.

The Daily Telegraph
In 2002 in response to the European Court ruling in the case of Christine Goodwin v. the UK that she had, among other rights, the right to marry a male person, Hakeem and 5 others wrote to The Daily Telegraph that such a ruling was

“a victory for fantasy over reality and that our concerns were that the problems and conflicts within the trans-sexually conflicted individual may not be wholly solved by either surgical or legal manoeuvres”.

"Trans-sexuality: A Case of the 'Emperor's New clothes'"
Hakeem contributed a paper, "Trans-sexuality: A Case of the 'Emperor's New clothes'", to the anthology from the Portman Clinic, Lectures on Violence, Perversion, and Delinquency. As the title indicates, he compares transsexuality to the story by Hans Christian Andersen about a king who goes naked thinking that he is wearing a special suit because no one will speak the truth.

Hakeem defines a trans-sexual as

"an individual who is biologically and unambiguously a member of one sex who holds the strong belief that he or she is in fact a member of the opposite sex". Not desires to be, or is striving to be, but is.

He takes exception to a 2002 article in the Psychiatric Bulletin where the authors refer to hormonal and surgical treatment as the appropriate treatment for trans-sexuals. Hakeem objects to the presumption that conventional psychotherapy, such as that in fact practised at the Portman Clinic, is not indicated. He objects that to see the core belief defining a trans-sexual as '"an encapsulated mono-delusional belief" is "surprisingly controversial":

"the very nature of the delusion being encapsulated means that such individuals are not 'psychotic' in the same way as, for example, a person with active schizophrenia or another disintegrative condition and explains why such individuals are able to function as perfectly able and capable human beings who do not appear to be affected in any other way than their apparent convictions over their gender."

And furthermore:

"It seems very hard for psychiatrists to challenge the fundamental core belief of the trans-sexual and examine with them what actually it is to be the opposite sex or indeed, more importantly, what it is to be any sex, without falling into the trap of personally or socially constructed actual or mythical gender stereotypes".

He muses that it is "almost as if we were performing neurosurgery by operating on a person's genitalia", and that it is "too politically incorrect even to question the false-belief systems of these individuals".

He mentions some of his patients: C has never had an identity, and if she were to become a man she believes that she could become a 'real' person; A, a retired ex-marine in his 50s, divorced and a father, attempted to become a women in her 30s; F, an immigrant with no friends after 30 years in Britain, thinks that would be less depressed as a woman; B detests homosexuality, and must become a women before having a relationship with a man.

Hakeem then iterates again that “one cannot actually change gender", and bemoans the lack of long-term follow-up studies to support the assumption that surgery is the appropriate treatment (unlike psychotherapy!). He dismisses the explanation that once trans-sexuals have had the operation, they no longer want to be medicalized.

He repeats his opposition to a person being allowed to marry as "a person of the sex which they are not", and his opposition to the changing of birth certificates "which is a record of one's gender at a certain point in time" (though without mentioning the problem of persons being obliged to produce their birth certificates). He concludes with a terrible possibility:

"a man marrying what he presumed to be a woman who had a female passport, a birth certificate declaring him to be female at time of birth, who is taken to be female and an individual whom he believed he could marry and who could be the mother of his children but in reality his wife actually being a man".

www.drazhakeem.com

The Transgender/Gender Identity page on his web site and aimed at the general public is far less confrontational:

"If a person is assessed and is clearly seeking physical gender reassignment and has no uncertainty about this then they are referred to the appropriate gender clinic. For other patients who may have more atypical gender presentations such as those described above they may be suitable for a specially tailored psychotherapeutic intervention aimed at further clarifying and establishing an understanding and certainty of their sense of gender which may or may not correlate with their biological sex.".

Transgender: Time to Change
In May 2011 the Royal College of Psychiatrists arranged a one-day meeting, "Transgender: Time to Change", featuring papers from Az Hakeem and Julie Bindel, but with no input from any trans persons. Understandably there was an outcry from trans persons, and the meeting was cancelled.

25 April 2011

Gloria Gray is the stage name of a trans woman born in Zwiesel, Bavaria, child of a long-distance lorry driver and a restaurateur. She is a graduate of the Deutsche Schauspielakademie in Munich, and had surgery in 1992 with the support of her parents.

She has won several court cases for slander regarding her past, including one against a Munich newspaper that had claimed that she is a transvestite.

In 2004 and 2005 she was a presenter and singer on Spanish television for the gay pride broadcasts, and premiered her show, Lieder im Mieder, at Munich's 2006 Christopher Street festival.

In 2007 she was featured in the Magie der Vielfalt photography exhibition.

Her autobiography, Mit allem, was ich bin, (With Everything that I Am), was released in 2009.

In 2010 she opened a cafe named after herself in Zwiesel, and in 2011 attempted to run for the Green Party in the mayoral election there, but did not get enough signatures. In 2006 she announced her intention to marry her male lover of many years in a church wedding, but the Catholic Church refused, and it has not yet happened.

22 April 2011

Also in 1987 Green published The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality. The gender variant children whom he had studied in the 1970s having by then grown up, and Green was able to locate two-thirds of both the 'sissy' group and the control group. Heshowed that ‘sissy’ boys who may be taken as early transgender boys girls actually mainly grew up to be gay, without transgender inclinations. Only one was considering a sex change but was being put off by the difficulties. Only one of the control group grew up to be bisexual. No members of either group grew up to be transvestites.

In 1992 he published Sexual Science and the Law, a review of various sexual fields and their legal situation, mainly in the US, but also in the UK. In the chapter on intergenerational sexuality he wrote that the experience for the younger person was not uniformly negative, based on a literature review. He later commented:

"Bruce Rind et al reached a similar conclusion from a more sophisticated meta-analysis and all hell broke loose. Fortunately for me, no one read my book.(quoted in Newman, 2009)"

In 1993 he was co-counsel for Elke Sommer in her successful libel suite against Zsa Zsa Gabor who had called Elke a has-been.

Since 1994 he has been Professor of Psychological Medicine, Imperial College, London, and research director at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, where he saw trans persons two days a week. His life partner Melissa Hines is a professor of psychology and director of the Behavioural Neuroendocrinology Research Unit at the City University of London. He is also a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he caused a stir by having his students read Thomas O'Carroll's book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case.

He was president of HBIGDA 1997-9. In 2002 he passed the editorship of the Archives of Sexual Behavior to Kenneth Zucker.

In 2002 Green questioned why pedophilia is classified as a mental disorder.

In 2004, Green was the sole defender of John Money in the BBC documentary, Dr Money and the boy with no penis, on the David Reimer case:

‘‘Based on what we knew at the time about how you become male or female or boy or girl, knowing the difﬁculties of creating a penis surgically, the decision that John Money made was the correct one. I would have made the same one’’ (Green, 2008).

He was one of the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic psychiatrists who brought a complaint to the General Medical Council that Russell Reid too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery.

In 2006, when HBIGDA changed its name to WPATH, Green objected that the change had not been put to a full-membership vote and achieved such a vote, but the name change was then voted for.

In 2008, after Alice Dreger had defended Michael Bailey's The Man who would be Queen, Green commented:

"Dreger's meticulously detailed and documented essay is on remarkedly even terrain .... And who knows whether [Christine Jorgensen]'s life story was entirely factual? In 1952, how else was an ‘‘Ex-GI’’ to become a ‘‘Blond Beauty’’. Homosexuality was both a mental disorder and a crime. Transsexualism was neither. Was Christine’s autobiography a ‘‘fairy tale’’? .... Is the Board [of HBIGDA] aware that there are medical and psychiatric professionals, including a transsexual, who side with Bailey in this situation? .... Conway, James, and McCloskey generated a fortune in publicity for Bailey’s book, attracting a moderate sized city of readers who otherwise would have never heard of it. (Lighten Up, 2008)"

In 2010 he criticized Ray Blanchard's proposal to introduce hebephilia as a mental disorder in the DSM-5.

In 2011, the Irish annulment case, B (formerly known as M) v. L, cited a diagnosis by Green that the husband was autogynephilic.

Playwright Bruce Bierman was one of the "sissy boys" seen by Green for seven years in the 1970s, until his parents removed him from the program when he was 13. Later he read Green's 1987 book, and in 2004 turned his memories of the experience into a solo performance, "The Blue Dress", that he presented in San Francisco.

*Not the artist, nor the actor nor the cricketeer nor the chemist nor the footballer.

The good: like John Money, Richard Green pushed to permit transsexual operations at a time when the vast majority of psychiatrists were against such surgery, and like Money arranged for his institution to become a GIC. He assisted Harry Benjamin and wrote approval letters for the patients who wanted surgery. If things had gone differently, this could have rebounded against him later in his career. He is one of very few sexologists to have written about male spouses of trans women. He spoke up more than once for the rights of trans parents to continue their relationships with their children. He appeared several times in court on behalf of trans women seeking to retain their jobs, and on behalf of the gay scout master (his one-time colleague Rekers testified in a different case on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America instead). He questioned the stereotypes about pedophiles. He was a major participant in removing adult homosexuality from the DSM.

On the other hand: He pioneered the Feminine Boy Project which has survived in the religious reparation therapy of NARTH and in Kenneth Zucker’s clinic at CAMH, although Green's conclusion that feminine boys merely grow up to become ordinary cis-homosexuals should invalidate the existence of reparative therapy. Green originated the Archives of Sexual Behavior which has become the organ for the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey heresy. While Green has many times spoken up for transsexuals against those who would deny surgery, and for employment and parental rights, when it came to a conflict between his colleagues and trans academics after Bailey’s book was published, he sided with his colleagues – this is not surprising. However when Russell Reid was under attack, he did not support him.

George Rekers later was a major person in the homophobic Family Research Council and NARTH, but resigned in 2010 after the press caught him on holiday with a rent boy.

The message of The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality thatthe vast majority of ‘sissy boys’ are not pre-transsexuals seems obvious now, but it needed to be said to counter false assumptions. It is good that autobiographies are now coming out by cis men who talk about their sissy childhood: Olivier Theyskens, Bruce Bierman, Kevin Sessums (Mississippi Sissy).

The boys were turning 20 or so when Green found them again to write The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality. However some do not come out as gay or trans until middle age. Now that almost another 25 years have passed, is it time for another follow-up?

Would you have confidence in these psychiatrists to distinguish between a transkid and a ‘sissy boy’? Do you feel that weak hand-eye co-ordination, playing with dolls, playing with girls identifies a transkid? 12 such boys had reparative therapy. There is no mention that any of the boys in either group had therapy to counter tendencies to bullying or homophobia. Why is being nice a failure of socialization, but bullying is not?

How come the Richard Green Wikipedia page makes no mention at all of the Feminine Boy Project? There is no Wikipedia page at all for the Feminine Boy Project. The New York Times obituary of Ivar Lovaas somehow forgot to mention the Project, and when Phyllis Burke interviewed Lovaas for her book (p46-51) he was apparently trying to disremember his involvement. Stony Brook is keeping quiet about its involvement.

If you do read The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality, I suggest that you also read Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock. In fact I recommend Burke's book by itself.

Given that Green compiled the Bibliography for Benjamin’s book, one now understands why the books and articles in the text are not in the bibliography, and the books and articles in the bibliography are not mentioned in the text. And also that all Green's publications up to 1966 are in the bibliography.

19 April 2011

Richard Green was raised in Brooklyn, NY. He earned an AB from Syracuse University in 1957, and an MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1961, where he was a student of John Money, who introduced him to gender variant children. Green had the idea of comparing the children to the recollections that adult transsexuals had of their own childhood. He published papers with John Money on such children.

Green did a psychiatric residency at the University of California at Los Angeles, Medical School 1962-4 with Robert Stoller. Money introduced Green to Harry Benjamin in 1964, and for two years he saw patients in Benjamin's New York office and wrote letters for them so that they could obtain surgery in Europe. He wrote the appendix on historical and cross-cultural aspects and the bibliography for Benjamin's book.

He then returned to UCLA as a Professor of Psychiatry. In 1969 he co-edited the ground-breaking Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment anthology with Money, with an Introduction by Harry Benjamin. The same year, with encouragement from Stoller, Green arranged the first transsexual operation at UCLA, only a year after Stoller had retracted his conclusions in the Agnes case.

In 1971 he became the founding editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior, after Stoller nominated him to the publisher, and stayed as editor for 30 years. He was significantly involved in the removal in 1973 of ‘homosexuality’ as a diagnosis in the DSM. In 1974 he published Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults, with a forward by Robert Stoller, which draws anecdotally on the children and adults whom he had seen as a psychiatrist. This book is still one of the very few to discuss the male spouses of trans women.

From the dust Jacket of Sexual Science and the Law

During the 1970s Green, Ivar Lovaas and George Rekers (more) headed the "Feminine Boy Project" funded by NIMH to at least $1.5 million. The basic study was a 15-year follow-up of 50 'feminine' boys matched with 50 other boys of comparable age. ethnicity and parental education. Both groups were studied using parental questionnaires, interviews with the boys, psychological testing and observations of playroom activity. There were follow-ups, usually at one-year intervals.The project was mainly located at UCLA and secondarily at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and also at the Roosevelt Institute in New York City, the Fuller Theological Seminary and the Logos Research Institute. The last two institutions are Christian, and their principal researcher was Rekers, who was the major advocate that the boys should be not merely observed, but treated, that is persuaded or cajoled back to gender conformity. Twelve pairs of parents consented that their son should enter such a course of treatment.

Green was the founding president of the International Academy of Sex Research in 1973 and a founding committee member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) in 1979, and was a co-author of the first edition of the Standards of Care.

In 1978 he published a paper, which is still rather unique, to the effect that a parent changing sex has only a small effect on the children, and that there is no reason why the trans parent should not continue to see the children.

He testified as an expert witness for transsexuals who lost their jobs in transition: Smith v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co, 1978; Ashlie, aka Komarnicki v. Chester-Upland School District, 1979; Terry v. EEOC, 1980; Kirkpatrick v. Seligman and Latz, Inc, 1981; and most famously for Karen Ulane in Ulane v. Eastern Airlines, Inc, 1983. He was also co-counsel for Curran v. Mount Diablo Council of the Boy Scouts of America, 1981, where an assistant scoutmaster had been rejected for being gay. Green completed his JD from Yale University Law School in 1987.

Testifying for Ulane, Green defined a transsexual as:

"Transsexualism is a pervasive, severe and long-standing discontent, discomfort, belonging to the sex to which one was born. It is accompanied by a long-standing wish for a variety of hormonal, surgical and civil procedures which would allow one to live in the sex role opposite to that to which one was born. This long-term discontent, dysphoria, if you will, with being male or female, is not a product of some significant type of mental disorder" (Sexual Science and the Law p106).

He defined a transvestite less satisfactorily:

"A transvestite is an individual who is content being the sex to which he was born, does not wish to undergo sex-change surgery. It is an individual whose primary gratification from cross-dressing or dressing in women's clothes is one of sexual arousal rather than a feeling of social comfort. (Ditto)"

17 April 2011

Raymond Browne-Lecky of Flintimara, Warrenpoint, County Down, was an enthusiastic actor in charitable productions, usually arranged by his mother.

Most of his roles were those of females. He impressed the local critics, and then when appearing in Dublin he overcame prejudices against female impersonations. His most successful role was taken to be that of the eponymous lead in Lady Audley's Secret. He also appeared as the self descriptive Mrs Gushington Nervesby.

Irish Society revealed that he had his dresses made by 'Mrs Slyne of Grafton Street', and he wore the family jewels on stage. He was contrasted to his mother who affected plain linen collars and sensible country clothes.

He retained a interest in theatre all his life, and after 1911 when he and his father moved to Ecclesville, Fintona, County Tyrone he had a private theatre built. However he gave up the female parts after his mid-twenties.

Roger Baker. Drag: a History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. cassell. 1994: 151-4.

Roger Baker explains the role of Lady Audley: "a pretty blonde bigamist who deserts her child, murders her first husband and has similar plans for her second - clearly the kind of role that any self-repecting drag queen would die for".

The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe (HBRC-Europe) is a professional organization devoted to the understanding and treatment of the diagnosis transsexualism.

HBRC-Europe Mission Statement
As a European multidisciplinary professional Association the mission of The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe (HBRC-Europe) is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, and public policy regarding the diagnosis transsexualism

HBRC-Europe Vision Statement
The vision of The Harry Benjamin resource center-Europe (HBRS- Europe) is to expand its European authority by promoting, education, advocacy, training, research, quality health care and best practice standards for service providers and policy makers regarding the diagnosis transsexualism.

And that is it. There is a list of board members, and a set of bylaws. And a Links page with no links. But nothing that you might call content. No essays, no discussion, no policy statement. In particular, as it was Charlotte Goiar who recommended this site to us, there is no mention at all of HBS.

The president is Thore Langfeldt. Here is his Wikipedia page. His major works are: Sexologi ,1993, Barns seksualitet (Child Sexuality),2000, and Erotikk og fundamentalisme: Fra mesopotamia til kvinnefronten (Erotica and fundamentalism: from Mesopotamia to the women’s movement),2005. He was active in the paedophila study group, Pedofil Arbeidsgruppe, in the 1970s, and was a defence witness for Erik Andersen, Norway’s most prominent sex crime convict.

The vice president is Ingvill Størksen, an advisor to the Norwegian Centre Party. She has published on gay and lesbian youth and on living with AIDS.

Board member Tone Maria Hansen is a trans woman, a sociologist, a co-founder and chair of Landsforeningen for transseksuelle, now known as the Harry Benjamin Ressurssenter in 2000. She is in WPATH and gave a paper at IFGE in 2003.

Board member Richard Green is research director at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic.

Conclusion

The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe is a tentative organization of academics, who, with the exception of Hansen and Green, have little experience with trans people. It is yet to be seen what will come out of it.

What is strange is that Charlotte Goiar endorses HBRCE. There is not the slightest indication that HBRCE will endorse HBS.

11 April 2011

Vadillo was born and raised in Cuba. After emigration to Los Angeles she became Amara. After injections of hormones and silicone, she was a 34 DDD.

She found work acting in shemale videos and performing at the West Hollywood Club 7969 under the name of Sylvia Boots. She became known for her love of the work, and that it showed on camera. She acted in over 50 videos (see ES.Wikipedia for a list), and as she had facial cosmetic surgery several times, she looks different over the course of her films.

She generally got on well with her fellow actors, with one exception, fellow performer Tanya Amadore. After being attacked by three of Tanya's friends outside a nightclub, Amara filed a criminal complaint with the police. In August 2002, Amara dated Jorge Espinoza without knowing that he was Tanya's boyfriend. After sex he brutally beat her and stole her car. Again she filed a police complaint. Three weeks later Jorge returned and shot her in the head. Miraculously Amara survived and still has the bullet in her head. She filed a third police complaint and was unofficially advised to carry a gun for self-defense.

On March 17, 2003 Amara and Tanya encountered each other in the ladies room at the Yukon Mining Co restaurant. Insults, hair pulling and punches started and were continued in the parking lot, and friends of both women joined in. It escalated to the point where Amara pulled out her gun. Tanya tried to take it away from her. It went off and Tanya's hand was seared with gunpowder burns. A few minutes later it was apparent that one of Tanya's friends, Laura Banuelos, was dying of a gun wound. Amara was arrested.

In jail she was able to positively identify Jorge Espinoza to the police for his attempt on her life.

Amara herself was charged with Murder in the first degree, Murder in the second degree, Voluntary Manslaughter, Involuntary Manslaughter and an Armed Allegation charge. Tanya was not charged. After 14 months in jail, Amara's trial lasted one week, the defense rested after one day, Tanya "unequivocally testified" that she did not touch the trigger and that she had not encouraged Jorge Espinoza to shoot Amara. The jury returned after five hours finding Amara guilty of second degree murder. She was convicted under the California law of transfer of intent that was intended to apply to a sniper situation.

58 people wrote letters and signed a petition urging the judge to reduce the sentence to Involuntary Manslaughter, but Amara was sentenced to 20 years to life for Second Degree Murder and an additional 25 years to life under the anti-sniping law, and that she has to pay $10,000 restitution to Laura's family if ever released on parole.

In January 2006 it was rumored that Tanya died after an incompetent injection of oil/silicone. Some think that this was a hoax to enable Tanya to escape police attention. In either case her video career was over.

The requirement to pay $10,000 is what in Sharia law is a called blood money, except that under Sharia, if you pay the money, you don’t go to jail.

The US gun lobby groups that proclaim that you should carry a gun to protect yourself don’t seem to be interested in this case.

Amara is mainly a female name, but sometimes given to boys. It is unclear whether Vadillo was called Amara at birth, at emigration or later. However she was charged under that name, so the California prosecution service took that to be her legal name.

The Wikibin article does not even mention the homicide.

Amara and Tanya put down each other and others as 'faggots'. An indication of their lack of self-consciousness.

09 April 2011

Thomas Adrián was raised in Caracas, and was sent, as a child, to a psychologist for gender problems. However, Adrián graduated in law at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and joined the family law firm, Adrián & Adrián. After completing a doctorate at the University of Paris in 1982, Adrián was was from then a professor of law at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, and at the Universidad Central de Venezuela from 1986. He married and had two children.

Adrián became a renowned activist for refugees, women's and gay rights. This work resulted in the inclusion of LGBT rights language in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions, even though Venezuela has resisted them.

As Tamara, Adrián had surgery in Thailand in 2002. She has since married a woman: they are the only legally married female couple in Venezuela. In 2004 she asked the Venezuelan Sala Constitucional del Tribunal Supremo to recognize her as Tamara. By 2010 it had not even ruled on the admissibility of the request. The Foro para los Derechos Humanos y la Democracia have supported Tamara in her denial of justice.

In 2009 Tamara was one of 33 experts who met in Los Angeles to discuss how to implement the Yogyakarta Principles. Also that year, the Metropolitan Council of Caracas awarded her the Luis Maria Olaso Order on behalf of emerging persons.

In 2010, still frustrated by the Constitutional Chamber, Tamara presented her papers to the National Assembly that she herself, being better qualified than is required, should be appointed to the Constitutional Chamber. At the personal interview, she was called by her male name, but refused to respond until called by her proper name.

++In 2015 Tamara was a candidate for Voluntad Popular, but was obliged to run under her male name. She was elected to Congress in the December elections.

07 April 2011

James Johnson was born in Geneva, Illinois, and educated in Wheaton. He majored in political science at Wheaton College, and while a student edited two railroad magazines.

A fan of the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin interurban railroad, he rode the line's last train west from Forest Park. In the early 1960s he wrote a history of Chicago Streetcars and then a history of the CA&E. He worked weekends as the General Manager of the Illinois Railway Museum in Union and helped the museum to significantly expand its operations, spending large amounts of his own money to purchase CA&E artefacts.

He joined the family printing business in 1972 after working for other companies in the same business. In 1988 he became the president of the family business.

At the turn of the century, Johnson transitioned as Julie Ann and became active in the Chicago Gender Society and the Be-All Conference for trans people.

In 2010 she completed a large project of placing her entire collection of CA&E materials online for public use.

She died of cancer at age 68.

James David Johnson. A Century of Chicago Streetcars, 1858-1958. Wheaton, Illinois: Traction Orange Co, 1964.

James D. Johnson. Aurora 'n' Elgin: Being a Compendium of Word and Picture Recalling the Everyday Operations of the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad. Wheaton, Ill: Traction Orange, 1965.

05 April 2011

Franciolini was born in Rome. She was a pioneer trans activist as early as the 1960s. She established what was then the largest trans community in the Acqedotto Felice slums.

In the late 1970s she lived in Turin and founded a trans group there.

Roberta, along with Marcella Di Folco, Gianna Parenti and Pina Bonanno, founded Movimento Italiano Transessuali in Rome in 1979. Working with civil rights activists, but Roberta as the main animatrice, they struggled for Law 164 ‘Norme in materia di rettificazione di attribuzione di sesso’, which was passed in 1982 and provided legal recognition of a person's acquired gender.

They worked with the Radical Party. In the 1980s she struggled against police repression and AIDS. At the 1994 Pride rally she gave the rousing cry: “questi vermi che ci vogliono schiacciare devono andare via (these worms that want to crush us must go)”.

In recent years Roberta was working with the Associazione Radicale Certi Diritti for sex workers' rights. She had intended to get back on the street, but she died of a heart attack at age 65.

03 April 2011

Proctor was raised in Kaikoura on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, the second of four children. After a difficult adolescence he was drug dependent for seven years, culminating in a suicide attempt. Neither parent accepted his femininity, and both died before he transitioned.

In 1980s, Proctor worked as a crane driver at the port of Lyttelton outside Christchurch during a period of strikes.

An unsympathetic psychiatrist told her emphatically that her stature and looks eliminated her as a potential candidate. However she persevered. She was on an invalid's benefit when she was scheduled to have surgery at Waikato Hospital in May 1997, but the local health authority decided to stop funding sex changes less than a week before.

In 2000 the Chief Ombudsman, Brian Elwood, ruled that Joanne had been unfairly treated, but it still took two more years before the surgery was done by New Zealand's sole sex-change surgeon, Peter Walker. Without consulting her, Walker decided to do a colovaginoplasty rather than a penile inversion, and left Joanne with post-surgical complications, which ended up costing the New Zealand Health Service as much again as the vaginoplasty had done.

The Chief Ombudsman had to appeal to the Broadcasting Standards Authority in that TVNZ edited an interview with him about Joanne to imply that the decision was a landmark and unusual when Elwood had in fact emphasized that it was neither.

Joanne lived at an isolated country home with minimal human interaction: "six or seven 'contact hours' with people a month, including grocery shopping and GP visits" (Martin 1/6/02).

She became an HBS activist on the internet, and the HBS liaison to OII in February 2009. She was also active on TS-SI, and was one of the major authors of the short-lived HBS Wikipedia page.

In 2010 she closed down her personal blog, and the New Zealand HBS site, and wrote Trans-Fried-Fluff, then deleted its contents, and rewrote it as Trans-FriedFluff. She has claimed that Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH, she was an admirer of Jan Wålinder, and of Thomas Szasz, and presented 'gender' as a creation of Robert Stoller and her co-patriate John Money, and transgenderism as a social construct similar to multiple-personality disorder and false memory syndrome. Sometimes she posted using the name P. J. Schrödinger.

"Professor Wålinder’s definition fell out of favour solely due to John Money’s duplicity over the outcome of the Reimer case. It was not the definition that was wrong. It was John Money. (Schrödinger,2010)"

The TS-Si obituary says that Joanne served "with distinction as a barrister". However this is not confirmed by the numerous articles in the NZ press.

"Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH". Does this mean that she thought that, say, Andrea James, is a spokesperson for the CAMH?

Wålinder's definition of transsexualism was:

1. A sense of belonging to the opposite sex, of having been born into the wrong sex, of being one of nature’s extant errors.
2. A sense of estrangement with one's own body; all indications of sex differentiation are considered as afflictions and repugnant.
3. A strong desire to resemble physically the opposite sex via therapy including surgery.
4. A desire to be accepted in the community as belonging to the opposite sex.

I agree that Jan Wålinder should not be so forgotten. Even the Swedish Wikipedia does not have an entry for him. However to connect his lapse into obscurity and Money's behaviour in the Reimer case is going out on a limb. True, the ICD definition of transsexualism was originally that of Wålinder and later adopted a John Money type wording based on gender identity, but that was because Wålinder had slipped into obscurity.

She doesn't apologize for, explain or even mention Szasz's transphobia.

Joanne's account of 'gender' totally ignores its use before the 19th century when it was reduced in scope to grammar, and also ignores how feminists took the concept and turned it into something quite different from what Money had intended.

01 April 2011

Chloe moved to Manhattan's East Village in 1982. She briefly worked at Studio 54. She became the ad director at the art magazine, East Village Eye, at a time when the local art scene was taking off. She became the partner of Bobby Bradley, one of the founders of the drag club, Pyramid, and was with him for nine years until he died of AIDS.

Chloe wrote and performed in a band with Antony Hegarty, and was the lead singer for the punk band, Transisters, which did songs about sexual abuse and being transgender.

In 1995 she was in the Wigstock movie. She also acted in Visiting Desire, 1996, Gang Girls 2000, 1999, and Rock Star, 2004.

She was a long-time volunteer at the LGBT Community Center's Gender Identity Project. She was also part of Transsexual Menace, and directed one of the first federally funded HIV prevention program for transgender sex workers in 1997.

Chloe encountered much ignorance and sheer prejudice by health professionals treating trans persons even when the problem was neither HIV nor specifically trans issues, including sudden dropping of treatment and refusals to answer.

As she was an AIDS activist, Mayor Bloomberg put her on New York’s HIV planning board, where she pushed to separate trans from gays in the HIV statistics.

Still an avid equestrian, Chloe launched Equi-Aids, a charity that gave inner-city kids the experience of horseback riding.

She was on the cover of POZ magazine in August 2004 as "Trannie get your gun", a theme that she proposed. In the article she declined to identify as female, preferring to stay outside the 'binary gender construct'.

Later that year she had the hip replacement required by her avascular necrosis.

In the L Magazine in 2006 she is quoted:

“I don’t get into political discussions at dinner often anymore, cause I want to embrace everyone no matter what. ‘Political’ for me is when I walk out of my house. If I can make an impact with my allies who share my views and/or pose questions to people, then that is maybe the best I can do politically. Love seems to be political to me these days, and has for many years. That loving somebody is so political, is such a heartbreaking truth.”

In 2007 she married trans man, performer T De Long (Chloe being legally a man and T a woman). She was rebuilding relationships with her family. Her visual art was becoming known, even internationally. In January 2011 she co-curated an exhibition of trans art, including some of her own drawings.

She was living at an HIV/AIDS residence and her prescription dosage had been raised after a brief hospitalization. She left around 2.00 am, wandered into a closed subway station and ended up underneath a service train. She was aged 50.

Here is one of her poems:

Ain’t nothing like knowin’ what it feels like…when you slip thru the cracks of society, political niceties, political correctness, health care, housing, employment, wealth, shoe stores, subways, family outings, holidays,
systems, systems, Systems. Ain’t nothing like knowing these facts deep in one’s bones. When you’re transsexual.
Ain’t nothing like knowing triumph over all of these adversities.”

As I tweeted on 19/3/11, four trans activists have recently died. This and the next three posts are dedicated to them. They were four very different people with quite different values in their activism.

Chloe was too young for gay lib, but much of what she did was a continuation of the spirit of gay lib. Of the four activists, it is she who comes closest to trans pride, I feel.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.